Too many corporate squares pretending to be cool

Students got over the 1960s long ago but business is still clinging to ideas like empowerment, creativity, team-work and vision , writes Lucy Kellaway

IN MAY 1968 I had my first sexual experience. I was almost nine at the time and that afternoon had been practising French skipping in my bedroom with my best friend, Tabitha. When we had tired of leaping over the elastic that was strung tightly between two chairs, she told me about French kissing and - briefly and rather less enthusiastically we practised that instead.

At around the same time my mother came home one day with a bag from Kids In Gear in Carnaby Street. Inside was a black jumbo-cord miniskirt, with a red leather belt almost as wide as the skirt, and a mustard skinny-rib polo neck. Never has an outfit given me more pleasure. Never have I felt quite so cool.

Apart from these two isolated incidents, the 1960s didn't leave much of a mark on me. Yet 40 years later the decade will not leave me alone.

It is my job to write about management trends and working life, and it seems that I have been writing about the values of the 1960s for a very long time.

It didn't happen at once. Indeed it took business about 20 years to work out that the 1960s had happened at all. When I joined the workforce in 1981, the culture was much the same as it had been in the 1950s: hierarchical and stable.

Jobs were still meant to be for life. But 1968 happened in offices around about 1988, and in 2008 the ideas of the 1960s are still affecting the ways we behave and think at work.

In the early 1960s a group of radical American students got together and drew up a blueprint for what they thought the world ought to look like. The celebrated Port Huron Statement called for work that was "educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated, encouraging independence . . . a willingness to accept social responsibility".

As Anthony Dworkin pointed out in the current issue of Prospect magazine, these ideas have now become enshrined in the workplace ideal that business schools preach. Empowerment, creativity, team-work, lifelong learning, values and visions: all these ideas had their roots in the 1960s. Students got over it. Business never has.

Some of these ideas have turned into a good thing in workplaces, others less so. The business equivalent of free love is job hopping, which means that employees can get into bed with any old employer and if it doesn't work out they can dump them and move on. In moderation this is good; in excess it is expensive for employers and destabilising for employees.

The idea of instant, and constant, gratification was also a big thing in the 1960s, but is not so good when translated to work. Jobs are often dull, and so if we expect the earth to move for us every time, we end up feeling cheated and disappointed when it doesn't.

Above all what characterised the 1960s was people pretending to be cool when they were actually quite square. "Far out, man," and "be free", they used to say.

The same now applies to most corporate executives. They speak a language infected with the spirit of the 1960s because they think it sounds good, not because they really mean it. My favourite example was the JP Morgan manager who instructed investment bankers to "take the time today to call a client and tell them you love them".

Peace and love proved a dodgy dictum even when applied to students. When applied to bankers it beggars belief.

Less extreme but more revealing was an e-mail forwarded to me last week and written by Devin Wenig, the new chief executive of the markets division of the newly merged Thomson Reuters. This message strikes me as a perfect example of the standard, professional memo that successful executives like to write. It is also an extraordinary hybrid: corporate jargon overlaid on 1960s hippy talk. The result is repulsive.

The point of the memo was to reassure customers that most of the services pre-merger will still be available to them post-merger; that the company is interested in their views; that it will try to improve its service. Simple stuff.

But it is expressed like this. Mr Wenig says the company's goal is to "develop deeper and richer innovative solutions".

"Delivery" and "solutions" are newish, but the rest is straight from the 1960s with its insistence on creativity and compulsory hyperbole. Indeed, the 1960s was the decade when adjectival inflation took hold. Until then something could be merely "good"; the 1960s made it "fabulous", "great" or "sensational".

The memo continues: "Going forward we are committed to supporting the vast majority of our products." Going forward is a modern monstrosity, but all that "supporting" and all that misplaced "commitment" is very 1960s.

Throughout the memo there is much hippy talk of customer "experience" of "reaching out" and of "passion". In this spaced-out world, suppliers are instead called "partners who share our vision".

The memo ends like this: "We are at the beginning of an exciting journey, and I look forward to sharing it with you." In the 1960s people did an awful lot of sharing (of joints, girlfriends/boyfriends, and so on) and went on a lot of trips together. But at least then they weren't so po-faced about it.

"Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields," sang the Beatles. "Nothing is real, nothing to get hung about . . ."

But that is just the trouble and that is why the spirit of the 1960s jars at work. In business it is real, and there is much to get hung about.